My View...
I use a pole to lift my camera 24’ off the ground, turning its vertical frame through an arc to capture a scene I can imagine, but am not actually seeing from the ground. I stitch individual frames into short panoramas, and leave the uneven edges as artifacts of the process.
The innovative work of the New Topographics photographers of the 70s was imprinted early, on my young and devoted self. Through a shift in point of view more than subject, these photographers created a Modernist relationship between the camera and the landscape. While retaining a deep respect and love for the primarily photographic image, their critical refocussing of point of view addressed arising geographic and ecological issues of the time, while foregrounding contemporary anxieties about the human relationship to land and landscape, culturally.
The heightened perspective of the camera on the pole provides a view out over a scene that feels like looking out a second floor window, or perhaps from the upper branches of a tree. Like the rake of a stage, it provides a generous, relational view, while gesturing, in a poetic sense, to a panoptic dream of wholeness.